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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Dead White Protestant Males and Digital Media

Up
until a few days ago, I had never written a personal blog, or a journal, or a
diary. My writing has always been on an external subject, usually someone who’s
been dead for at least 100 years.

One of the reasons that we know as much as we do about the
Founding Fathers is that most of them left volumes of correspondence and
journal entries. As pointed out by Joseph Ellis in his book American
Creation (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2007), the Founders were keenly
aware that their future reputations would depend on the quality of the paper
trail that they left behind. This leaves modern historians with a huge number
of documents to examine, knowing of course that it all needs to be edited for
language and the bias of the author.

This makes me wonder what historians 100 years from now will
examine to learn about us. Nowadays personal journals are kept online, personal
photos are digitized. Shoppers keep their shopping lists on their smart phones,
instead of writing them down. Books, magazines and letters printed on paper
last a long time; so do printed photographs. CDs, memory sticks and computer
hard-drives become corrupted and unusable with the passage of just a few
decades, making internet servers and electronic databases the best sources for
preserving materials.

But even these resources have problems. Outdated or irrelevant
data is removed from internet servers during regular maintenance, and databases
are often maintained by private foundations and university archives, which have
high standards for what gets preserved and what does not. This is good, until
you consider that most correspondence and journal entries nowadays probably
won’t make the cut. The memoirs of our political leaders and great thinkers
will probably be kept (like the Founders!) but little else.

The “Great Man” theory of history has come under severe criticism
in recent years for its failure to talk about much more than the already
familiar giants of the world stage. Modern technology allows ordinary people to
communicate across vast distances instantly, and to store huge amounts of
information in tiny containers. Modern technology has democratized information sharing.
But unless individuals themselves take steps to ensure the survival of their
information, it’s possible that most of the history written about the 21st century
will be “Great Man History.”

Many of the sources preserved for future use will be government
documents, electronic databases, newspapers, etc. It’s unlikely that much
content uploaded to the web via Facebook, Twitter, and email will remain intact
for these future historians. Will the 22nd century know how the
diverse people of the 21st century thought? How they dressed?
Or, considering the dilemma of the shopping lists, what they ate?

There is hope, however. There are many organizations working to
promote the practice and understanding of history using these new technologies.
Some do it by maintaining and backing up existing sources digitally. Some
develop new tools for assessing old papers. A good example of a organization
that does both is the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George
Mason University. You can find the link here.

Thanks for the tip, Elise. I looked at the LOC website and, in addition to their Twitter archive, they're also sponsoring the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program,which aims to maintain "at-risk digital content." I'm not sure what the criteria for preservation will be, but it's a step in the right direction. Stay tuned to the LOC for further developments on digital media initiatives.

About Aaron M. Dougherty

Aaron is a 2010 graduate of Eastern Michigan University's Master's program in History, with an undergraduate degree in History and Writing. Since 2010, he's worked as a writer, researcher, and historical interpreter for several museums and historical societies in the greater Boston area. Writing this blog is MOSTLY for fun.